What’s New @ HHSL

In our continued celebration of International Open Access Week, I would like to direct your attention to some of my favorite scholarly resources that just so happen to also be Open Access or promote Open Access.

So, can it be any good if it’s free? You bet! OA publishers have banded together to police the landscape, ensuring adherence standards regarding peer review, licensing, and research integrity, and more.

Stay tuned all week as we give you more information about OA publishing, self-archiving, other free learning materials online, and more! But for now, enjoy some of our favorite scholarly resources in the OA community.

Affiliated with the Association of Research Libraries, the Scholarly Publication and Academic Resources Coalition is an international alliance of academic and research libraries working to create a more open system of scholarly communication. Includes excellent information about Article-Level Metrics, a new approach to quantifying the reach and impact of published research.

Finally, I have to mention the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium of natural history and botanical libraries working to digitize biodiversity literature and make it available for open access. BHL is not a publisher, but works with libraries and publishers to make important historical and current scientific literature available free to anyone with an internet connection. Besides serving some of the rarest and most remarkable literature you will ever see online, my interest in the OA world stems directly from the 6 years I spent working with BHL.

This is just a small selection of resources in an ever-expanding OA world; feel free to comment if there are others you would like to share!

Scholarly communication refers to “the system through which research and other scholarly writings are created, evaluated for quality, disseminated to the scholarly community, and preserved for future use (Association of College and Research Libraries ).”

Scholarly communication relies in part on the ability of research libraries to purchase published works. The marketplace for scholarly publishing has developed in ways that challenge libraries’ ability to acquire the works needed by their users. Commercialization of publishing in both the for-profit and nonprofit sectors has led to egregious price increases and unacceptable terms and conditions of use for some key research resources needed by the scholarly community.

How can Tufts University Libraries help?

The Tufts University Libraries are here to help you navigate through the publishing landscape and learn about copyright, fair use, and open access publishing.

Some ways Scholarly Communications @Tufts can help you:

Learn about managing your copyrights, and use the Author’s Amendment when you negotiate with publishers.

Consider using a less restrictive Creative Commons license.

Deposit your research in the Tufts Digital Repository, so that it can be openly accessed.

Consider putting your course in Tufts OpenCourseWare, and construct it carefully, so that you have the necessary permissions to do so.

Keep up with developments in the open access movement by regularly reading:

Open Access News – daily blog following the latest open access developments supported by the Open Society Institute and SPARC

Create Change – advocacy and education campaign cosponsored with the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of College and Research Libraries to engage the academic community in reclaiming scholarly communication.